News From The Ministry Of Truth
By Michael R. Bowen (04/22/03)
The news media these days provide a "target-rich environment" for anyone hunting for balderdash. I'm hard pressed to choose a winner from the likes of CNN's explanation of its dishonest Baghdad reporting, Maureen Dowd's vituperative anti-Bush diatribes, and gems like France's recent pronouncements about the management of postwar Iraq. I was almost paralyzed with dizziness from so many choices, with my deadline looming. But I was rescued by the latest howler from E.J. Dionne in the Houston Chronicle: "Iraq's Looters Answer the Anti-Tax Crowd".
How, you ask, does the predictable eruption of looting in a freshly-conquered city refute the ideas of anti-tax Republicans? Doesn't this happen every time there's a disaster in a city? My friend, like me, you are handicapped by not being E.J. Dionne; this man's mind is so advanced that it has caught up to the German Enigma machine of World War II fame. You can input straight data, and it will produce for you a totally scrambled printout.
Mr. Dionne looks on the looting mobs in Baghdad and sees the fruit of the abolition of government. He sees the chaos which inevitably follows a loosening of the official grip on society. There's a stern lesson here for those anti-tax fools: "Without government, individuals have no way to vindicate their rights to property, to basic personal liberty, to life itself." "No government, no property. No government, no security from looting, theft or violence. No government, no national defense. No government, no social stability. No government, no securities law. No government, no food inspections, no consumer and environmental protection, no safeguards for workplace rights, no social insurance."
As George Will would say: Well.
Nobody's talking about no government, my friend. We are, however, talking about too much government. For without our ridiculously bloated government, there'd be: no midnight basketball, no taxpayer-funded sex-change operations, or heart transplants for imprisoned murderers, no confiscation of private property in the name of unsubstantiated pseudoscientific environmental claims, no taxpayer-funded photographs of the Crucifix in a bucket of urine, or the Virgin Mary with elephant dung, no federal dollars providing comfy tenured lives for academicians who teach lies to our children, and, well, you get the picture. E.J. departed from the Constitution right after mentioning national defense. Yes, Mr. Dionne: that Constitution.
But we needn't get involved in a debate about how the Left believes in Government, not in the Constitution. The great whopper is the one he presents us right out of the gate: civil unrest in Baghdad is what we would have here if it weren't for our wonderful Federal Government. The Los Angeles riots after the Rodney King trial? Must have been the other Los Angeles. Why, a chunk of my own beloved New Hampshire appears to have escaped the United States entirely this weekend, because there was a riot after the University of New Hampshire lost a hockey game. Tectonic plates moving, that's my guess. Or maybe CENTCOM has been lobbing cruise missiles at UNH when we weren't looking.
This poor man can't seem to see that the people of Iraq didn't have a government before the Marines got there; they had a very nasty man with one hand around their throats and the other in their pockets. They weren't just being taxed, they were being robbed and murdered. And starved. Once America popped the lid off, they were going to foam up no matter what. The wealth being stolen from them wasn't going to day-care centers, it was going for bombs and palaces. And those bombs and palaces were not for their protection: they were for their suppression. Saddam's Iraq was intrusive government to the nth degree.
Our Sage wants us to learn the basic lesson: "The alternative to tyranny is not the abolition of government." But this is less than half way to the truth. The alternative to tyranny is the abolition of tyranny. The alternative to bloated, wasteful, intrusive government is not the abolition of government, it's the abolition of bloated, wasteful, intrusive government. Whether it's corporate welfare or government handouts to perverted "artists", it's way out of bounds, far beyond the rightful functions of government in a republic. True, without a government restraining the behavior of criminals, we'd be unable to enjoy the right to private property. But what happens when the government abrogates our right to private property? It's doing it today, through mechanisms like environmental law, the War on Drugs, and many others.
No, Mr. Dionne, if our government shrinks we won't have rioting and looting. But maybe if we get back to funding the things our Constitution specifies, we'll have enough police, an infrastructure in good repair, and strong enough military to defend both coasts. We'd just have to get by without photographs of men with bullwhips in their rectums. Me, I've done it for years. High taxes and big government protecting us from massive civil unrest? As the man said, "That isn't right...... it isn't even wrong."
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